Departmental News
Reimer and Colleague Author Analysis of Group Heuristics
Assistant professor Torsten Reimer, along with a colleague from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Germany (Gero Schwenk), have authored a study of heuristics and networks as decision-making processes for groups. The article appears in the June 2008 issue of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, an online, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal.
Schwenk and Reimar suggest in the article that the concept of heuristic decision making is adapted to dynamic influence processes in social networks. They report results of a set of simulations, in which they systematically varied: a) the agents' strategies for contacting fellow group members and integrating collected information, and (b) features of their social environment — the distribution of members' status, and the degree of clustering in their network. As major outcome variables, they measured the speed with which the process settled, the distributions of agents' final preferences, and the rate with which high-status members changed their initial preferences. The impact of the agents' decision strategies on the dynamics and outcomes of the influence process depended on features of their social environment. This held in particular true when agents contacted all of the neighbors with whom they were connected. When agents focused on high-status members and did not contact low-status neighbors, the process typically settled more quickly, yielded larger majority factions and fewer preference changes. A case study exemplifies the empirical application of the model.
Citation: Schwenk, Gero and Reimer, Torsten (2008). "Simple Heuristics in Complex Networks: Models of Social Influence." Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation11(3)4 <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/11/3/4.html>.
